The Left’s Rotten Rallying Cry of
Retreat:
Cowardice is Not a Strategy

by M. Junaid Alamwww.dissidentvoice.org
August 17, 2004First Published in
Left
Hook

Bracing
against a German assault that swiftly and brutally tore through western
Russia in the summer of 1941, Josef Stalin remarked, “In the Soviet army it
takes more courage to retreat than advance.” Today many radicals have joined
the liberals and chattering classes in imagining themselves as partaking in
an equally epic struggle with similar tactics; the Bush regime is Hitlerism
reborn, an evil menace that can only be swept away by first retreating from
many of the values and causes which they once rallied around in defense of
the oppressed and downtrodden.

But whereas the Red Army
only ceded ground to reorganize and make a stronger stand around defensible
positions, the battle cry of ‘Anybody But Bush’ sends its adherents
scurrying towards a candidate and party which have – in no uncertain terms -
fully endorsed and vowed to continue perpetrating the two most morally
indefensible and politically disastrous tragedies of our time: the
occupation of Iraq and Palestine. This hardly concerns our ABB
intelligentsia: so entranced by their fanatical fear, zealous hatred, and
personal demonization of George Bush, they have decided that removing him
from power justifies abandoning any actual political position.

What these champions of
capitulation fail to understand, however, is that the Bush program –
epitomized by implementation of neoconservative American-Israeli fantasies
made realizable by September 11th – is already being resisted by the
defiance and courage of those marked as its first targets – the Iraqis and
Palestinians. The brazen, arrogant program of quickly conquering Iraq and
forcing the Palestinians to submit to a false peace, which was to be the
pincer movement in crushing and demoralizing the Arabs, is being challenged
and disrupted by the realities of mass resistance on the ground. Against
this backdrop of active struggle, the ABB directive to vote pro-war and
pro-occupation, far from being any kind of principled or “pragmatic” retreat
justifiable in a situation like the summer of 1941, is more akin to engaging
in mass desertion during the fall of 1942 - when the crucial defense of
Stalingrad was mounted to finally halt the Nazi advance.

The ABB message is
perfectly clear: in today’s internationalized Stalingrad that is the “war on
terror”, Palestinians can continue getting mowed down protesting the walls
that imprison them, Iraqis can continue getting slaughtered in their own
cemeteries fighting a foreign invasion, but we – ensconced in our placid,
secure, luxurious lives – simply have “no option” but to vote for war and
occupation conducted by Kerry as opposed to war and occupation conducted by
Bush, because our problem is far more urgent than colonialism: Bush’s
“uncouthness” and inability to properly pronounce “adjectival clauses.”
(1) That victims of American-made bullets and bombs will
be able to appreciate these most noteworthy differences is doubtful.

In reality, the
quintessential point about the Bush administration is not that it is
uniquely crass or particularly dim-witted, but that its most reactionary
maneuvers – unconditional support for rabid Zionism and pre-emptive war
against Iraq – have produced a new set of political dynamics
dangerous to imperialism which the American ruling elite as a whole
has unequivocally decided to contain at any cost. Chief among its goals are
destroying the Iraqi insurgency and propping up a stable strong-man regime,
continued strangulation and ghetto-ization of the Palestinian masses, and an
attempt at containment, in the form of perpetual war, against a growing
Islamist movement fueled by the two aforementioned policies, including
possible war with Iran (blamed for Iraq quagmire) and Pakistan (with
Islamists seizing state power).

To pretend that Kerry
operates outside this ruling-class consensus is patently absurd. He helped
lead the nation into war with Iraq in his capacity as senator by voting to
authorize Bush with war powers and has declared ex-post facto support
for the war even absent its original pretexts. The liberal-led stampede to
elect Kerry is undoubtedly one of the greatest self-deceptions of all time;
so obsessed with the superficial quirks of the Bush persona, it will gladly
vote the Bush war agenda into power so long as it is administered by some
other – any other - individual. The Bush regime has therefore fulfilled its
historical function; it has outlined the path of America’s descent which the
good soldier John “reporting for duty” Kerry and his sycophants will lead us
down with due diligence. Or as the
New Left Review
recently editorialized, “[T]he Bush revolution has succeeded; it has
produced its heir.” (2)

Given this state of
affairs, it is unconscionable for radicals to provide cover fire for the
massive liberal deception campaign that is Anybody But Bushism. More than
half of all Americans oppose the war in Iraq. Almost the entire world – and
especially the Arab world - stands against the occupation. Young American
men and women are being forced into virtual military slavery with endless
extensions on their tours of duty, fighting in the hundreds of thousands,
killing in the tens of thousands, becoming maimed in the thousands, and
dying in the hundreds. And we are to support this madness by backing a more
“efficient”, more “eloquent” proponent of war? Let us not mince words:
adoption of any such program is not only a betrayal of radical tradition and
ideas; it is a betrayal of humanity.

Instead of asserting a
strong, confident, and politically sharp stance laying out the class
realities of the overall ‘war on terror’ and the two-party machine that
perpetuates it, many radicals are peddling watered-down versions of ABBism
that sow confusion, foster illusions, and rob of us moral clarity and
authority. Some of the arguments offered by radicals in the ABB camp are
simply untrue or plainly bizarre, completely contradicting historical facts
and political realities that should not be so easily lost upon us.

For instance, in a recent
interview, discounting the notion that Bush’s “unit[ing] [of] the world
against the United States empire,” is “a good thing”, Tariq Ali intoned:
“This is an argument you can have from the luxury of your sitting room or
kitchen in the United States, but the fact is that this particular regime
has taken the lives of at least 37,000 civilians in Iraq as a result of the
war…Thirty-seven thousand civilians have died, and for them it's not an
abstract question...” Ali then concluded with a rhetorical question quickly
seized upon by ABBers everywhere: “Do we defeat a warmonger government or
not?”

There can only be one
honest answer to that question: replacing one warmonger-in-chief with
another does not constitute a “defeat” for a “warmonger government.” Since
Kerry has explicitly made clear that he would not have changed his vote to
authorize the war against Iraq even in retrospect, and will merely work to
recruit more U.S. allies to assist in “stabilizing” Iraq, there is
absolutely no basis whatsoever for any thinking person to magically
conclude that Iraqi civilians will receive any respite from a Kerry
administration. At a time when some radicals have apparently lost some of
their senses, they can always look across the barricades for a reality
check: Staunch conservative commentator William Buckley Jr. recently wrote
(with much satisfaction), “Get from your paper supplier the thinnest sheet
in the inventory, and you won't succeed in wedging it between the Republican
and the Democratic position on the nature of our strategic objectives in
Iraq.” (3) Full stop.

Tariq Ali should also take
note of the fact that while upwards of 37,000 Iraqi civilians have been
killed under Bush, it was under the Clinton regime that approximately
1,000,000 Iraqis were murdered by sanctions deemed “genocidal” by the very
men who were appointed to enforce them. And whereas Ali contends elsewhere
in the interview that a Democratic administration would not have gone to war
in Iraq in the first place, it should be further noted that he is disputed
by no less an authority than Hillary Clinton, who not only avidly supports
the war but recently praised it as a continuation of her husband’s past
policies. (4) This assessment was also confirmed by
Clinton foreign policy adviser Strobe Talbott, who said, “The Bush
administration was right to identify Iraq as a major problem. A President
Gore…would have ratcheted up the pressure, and sooner or later resorted to
force.” (5) The bottom line is that nothing will change
for Iraqis by voting for Kerry, and the sooner we stop deluding ourselves
and others with false hopes in this or that candidate, the better prepared
we can be to launch a genuine antiwar campaign from the ground up.

A more exotic brand of
ABBism was recently offered up by Naomi Klein in the pages of The Nation
magazine. To her credit, Klein explicitly rejects the standard fare ABB hype
about Bush as the epitome of evil and Kerry as the nation’s savior. But her
case for joining the Anybody But Bush camp borders on the surreal.
Identifying a phenomenon among some progressives she calls “Bush Blindness”,
which “causes us to lose sight of everything we know about politics,
economics and history and to focus exclusively on the admittedly odd
personalities of the people in the White House”, Klein demands, “This
madness has to stop, and the fastest way of doing that is to elect John
Kerry…Only with a bore like Kerry at the helm will we finally be able to put
an end to the presidential pathologizing and focus on the issues again.”

In other words, we should
place “at the helm” a man who openly supports continued strangulation of
Iraq, deems Israel’s brutality “the cause of America” and personally opposes
abortion and gay marriage because some progressives (and what grand
progressives they must be!) fail to grasp important and pressing realities
that - unlike Bush’s syntax - affect the lives of millions. Perhaps Klein
advanced this “vote Kerry because Bush makes leftists silly” thesis as a way
to distance herself from the underpinnings of the ABB line while technically
accepting it in order to placate the many staunch ABBers associated with The
Nation, but in the end this only makes Klein herself look silly. After all,
launching political strategies devised around those who conveniently “lose
sight of everything we know” at the crucial hour is bound to be as
successful as sending Icarus soaring into the sun.

With an air of profound
authority and wisdom, professional and reluctant ABBers alike will plead
that all of the above is simply beside the point. The crux of the matter,
they say, is that at the end of the day Kerry is at least somewhat better
than Bush – or in fashionable far-left parlance – “Kerry is horrendous - but
Bush is worse.” Therefore, the logic goes, a Kerry outcome will defeat and
spare us some of Bush’s policies. The problem is that this is an utterly
false and formalistic construction. This kind of logic is no better than
that of a man who, when pierced by an arrow, exhorts his friends as they try
to pull it out, “Stop! The shaft is horrendous – but the tip is worse!”

Of course the
Democratic Party must be marginally better than the Republicans on some
issues – if a two-party capitalist system did not contain one party that
gave token support to non-elites, the system would collapse overnight from
ideological bankruptcy. But this difference does not make the Democrats
oppositional to the elite’s program anymore than the seeming
harmlessness of an arrow’s shaft makes it oppositional to the dangerous tip
it is delivering. Briefly tracing back some of the politics surrounding the
current so-called “war on terror” from the present period, we can clearly
see this dynamic in motion and elaborate upon it.

No serious person denies
that Iraq is the most salient political expression of the world crisis of
imperialism. The occupation and resistance in Iraq forms the fulcrum of
political fault lines, tensions, and consciousness the world over. The
issues which are symbolically and strategically at stake are well-known and
call for no elaboration; suffice it to say that the conflict, viewed and
fought as the defining battle between conflicting political, religious,
national and historical forces, exerts enormous centrifugal tendencies that
could ignite the entire region in war, conquest, chaos, and revolution.

In this conflict of such
magnitude and importance, it is equally indisputable that the Bush regime’s
pretexts for war have all been totally eviscerated. Major scandals
surrounding Chalabi, Abu Ghraib, the lack of WMD or Iraq – al-Qaeda links,
and emergence of widespread, enduring Sunni and Shiite revolts have mocked
the fairy-tale narrative concocted by the Bush administration for months.

All the more interesting it
is, then, that the “opposition” candidate of the Democratic Party hasabsolutely failed to capitalize upon any of this to his own political
advantage. In fact, an impossible thing has happened: Bush has been able to
effectively ridicule Kerry for “flip-flopping” on the war, charges which
have stuck all the more strongly not because Kerry actually ever opposed the
war, but because he has nitpicked with this or that aspect or method of it
before ultimately declaring he backed the decision to wage it. The point is,
Kerry has clearly decided not to make the elections a referendum on the war,
even though he could have torn apart his opponent and seized the initiative
- and with it, the election. He would rather fall on the sword of the
capitalist consensus to march onwards towards further mayhem in the Middle
East than betray his class and galvanize the broader public.

The lesson here is simple:
the Democratic Party does not act, but only reacts; it merely acquiesces to
“facts on the ground” created by right-wing forces. This is equally true in
the immediate aftermath of September 11. During that time, there was in
America only one political force with a concrete vision, sense of purpose,
and the determination to carry out its own agenda without hand wringing and
endless vacillation: the Republican Party. It marshaled its forces swiftly
and sprung forward with an ideological and political offensive that allowed
it to frame the parameters of debate and direct the course of events. The
group of ideologues known as neoconservatives, who had been skulking on the
outskirts of official opinion for more than twenty years, suddenly thrust
its program into the center of national attention and began dominating
discourse.

Where were the Democrats
during all of this? Where were their heroes and leaders and thinkers? Where
was their program and platform in response to this crisis? Since September
11th the party’s members have merely voted for the Republican-backed
programs of domestic surveillance (PATRIOT Act), unjustifiable war
(Operation Iraqi Freedom), and aggressive pro-Israeli posturing (Syrian
Accountability Act). Apparently no leadership, thinking, or program is
required when you can simply adopt them from the “opposing” party. And prior
to September 11th, what great wall separated Democratic foreign policy from
that of the Republicans? Both were equally brutal, unjust, and effective in
making their Arab victims fear and hate the US government.

The ineluctable truth is
that no “evil cabal” or “particularly reactionary” set of creatures in our
government can be blamed for the dangerous and unsafe world we now inhabit.
That the Bush administration may be evil or reactionary is not the cause
of the present state of affairs but rather one result of a long-running
state of affairs in which the nation’s “left-wing” party, (a) enables
the agenda launched by their right-wing counterparts through silence and
complicity, and then (b) administers this same agenda and oversees
all its consequences once the Right has fumbled and blundered its way into
unpopularity.

Today, the consequences are
particularly deadly. The long reach of Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism has
illustrated to us in no uncertain terms the urgency of defeating the joint
bipartisan project of outsourcing death and misery to poorer parts of the
globe. No longer can the government drop thousands of bombs in a reign of
terror in some far off place against innocents without risking – indeed,
amplifying – the threat of terror against innocents here at home. What was
never conscionable from the moral vantage point has now become – by the
measure of any rational person – untenable from the practical vantage point
as well.

Unfortunately, the
Democratic Party is interested not in what is rational, but rather what is
profitable. It is committed to the path of sustained war, which will only
aggravate and amplify all the horrors and dangerous we already face.

This leaves the radical
left with two options: we can either leave the two-party arrow lodged in our
chest because one part is “less horrendous” than the other and bleed to
death, or we can remove it completely, concentrate on developing our own
movements from below – and fire back.

M.
Junaid Alam, 21, is co-editor & webmaster of
Left Hook, where this
article first appeared. He can be reached at
alam@lefthook.org.

NOTES

1. Left Hook contributor Michael Dempsey
pointed out in this article’s footnote that “The Harvard Democrats for
Kerry have a poster which assails President Bush for his ‘uncouthness.’”
Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle spent the first few paragraphs
of his anti-Bush tirade complaining about Bush’s grammar, including
adjectival clauses. Common Dreams of course, dutifully
reprinted it here.
2. New Left Review editorial, July-August 2004 edition.
3. “The New War Hawk”, an op-ed that appeared in Yahoo! News online on
August 10th, 2004.
4. NY Observer, August 11, 2004 “On Truman’s Train, Kerry Comes Down On
War—He’s For It,” by Robert Sam Anson.
5. See note 2.